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64 The Great Opportunity
But what of conventionality, when they got the poor fellow to Jesus?
The trouble with seme of us is that we expect the Lord to repeat
Himself. We saw the Lord’s work in our youth and think that any-
thing that is not done in the same manner, can never be from God.
And so we sometimes come to oppose the Lord. God save us from
that!
When a pastor in a western state some years ago, some of my par-
ishioners came to me one day and said: "Pastor, there is a man down
town who preaches and breaks horses at the same time, what do you
think of him?" I said: "How can he break horses and preach at the
same time?" "Oh," they said, "he is not in a church, he is on the
street,"
So I went to see this strange sight. There was a man on the street-
corner, breaking a broncho for a farmer, free of charge, and while the
broncho, head and tail tied together, danced around on a vacant lot,
the brother was preaching the Gospel to the crowd that had gathered.
After a while I went and spoke to him, and asked him about his
work. He said: "Brother, when I was converted the only thing I
could do well, was to break horses. So I thought I might ply my
trade and at the same time serve the Lord. Now you see I reach
some people that you never could get inside a church." And he cer-
tainly did. I told my people to help the brother all they could. As
long as he preached Jesus it did not concern me that he went about
it in a strange way. The Lord blessed his work, and that is the chief
thing.
The Lord did a very strange thing when he closed the door of the
Gospel and forbade the preachers to speak. But he did so because he
wanted them to go through
The Door That Was Open
It is just as great a mistake to try to get your head through a door
that the Lord has closed, as it is to fail to enter one that He has
opened. It seems to me that some doors are being closed in this
country. We find crowds of church members in this country, who are
hardened to the Gospel. In a critical spirit they will discuss the
preacher and his delivery instead of the message, the shell instead
of the kernel. They will antagonize anything that cuts into their
hearts. Preaching to such is usually vain. Why try to enter closed
doors?
May we not look for doors to open through the present world con-
flict, doors that have been closed for centuries? You know the Lord
uses the world governments, the world armies, sometimes to further
His plans, to bring about things that the world does not understand,
cannot see, and would not respect could it see them. The Lord set
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